The Hard Talk: Community Contributors

To me all this esl-blabla and talk about how relic has improved over the last months is just a masqerade for the biggest flaw of relic.
They have degraded themselfes to nothing more then modders - remember: "we are working with the engine, not on the engine"?

As sad as it is - coh2 is a slowly starving game (I hope very slowly).

Without the active twitch-dudes and all the community-effort most of you guys are doing coh2 would be already dead.
...And now you guys are starting to act like forum-divas. PLEASE STOP IT!

An interesting piece.

I saw Ipkais forum posts on ESL before and his frustration was very visible and understandable. Fair to post it in theses forums. Valuable to have it there.
Having this as a front page article on COH.org gives me the impression that COH2.org itself sees COH2 going downhill. For me as a reader this very easily gives the impression that COH2.org itself does not care a lot anymore.

The article says otherwise, it states that it is simply a single opinion. Well, that is a weird excuse. Sounds like a legal notice nobody will care about. It actually sounds a bit dishonest to me.

Summing up, I can understand Ipkai’s frustration. I absolutely cannot understand to have this as the front page article. What do you want to achieve by doing that? Tell everybody else to stop working on the site, stop working with relic because it is useless? Tell Relic to not work with COH2.org because they are difficult to deal with?

Frustration is a nasty thing to deal with. Headline articles won’t do anything good about it I am afraid.

He is stating the 'what', but is leaving 'what next' as an open question. I think you are inferring his opinion to a lot of things. He actually states in the article that he wants to be able to work with relic in an easier way, and emphasizes the interest of community contributors to collaborate. You may want to PM him if you are curious about what exactly he thinks should be done.

Prizepools just increased to €1300 and $1400 for monthly cups and increases across the board elsewhere, this was clearly in the making and it may be that Relic wanted to ensure they got the format right at first and only commit fully once they were confident they had.

Now the overall ESL offering is the biggest prizepool we've ever seen in CoH, I hope that excites people and gets them on board, cus the format is great and the level of competition is getting better all the time.

http://play.eslgaming.com/companyofheroes2/europe/news/263033/

Good on Relic and props to the volunteers who are making it happen. I just wish the community forums were back up and running.

Heyo all,

big Respect to IpKaifung, who managed ESL long before. There is a lot of truth in there and
I get that a lot of people are disapointed - we lost a lot of great community casters and tournament organizers and so on. But the critique is too harsh.
Should relic include the coh2.org crew more? yes they should. On the other hand there are new stars rising, which would never have gotten so much spotlight in such a short time (magpie or A_E come to mind) As a fan, i am really happy with the way ESL develops. Great games, good casts oviously not SNF level yet, but very entertaining stuff.

If Relic sticks to this path, i don´t have too much to bitch *cough* optimisation *cough*. I even have the feeling that through the many top player games and replays, the threads are more about strategy, than the usual "p2w - this" or "broken that".

Maybe relic understands through time what great assests the coh2.org crew around Ami could be, what a wonderful world this could be.

Best Regards

awa59b

Prizepools just increased to €1300 and $1400 for monthly cups and increases across the board elsewhere,.......

Now the overall ESL offering is the biggest prizepool we've ever seen in CoH... http://play.eslgaming.com/companyofheroes2/europe/news/263033/

I love this!!!!
this,
and a state of the game that is constantly getting better, better balance, ...., in a speed far faster than in vCoH times.......the overall direction is promising!

if the keep going that way, they might make me..........excited :-)

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Relic with the counter!!! Raises prize pool. That's what I'm talking about!!!

*applauds*

They should improve the game rather than distract us with prize pools. Change the commander system, reduce insta wipes, and optimize. Content bloating is a bigger issue in COH2 than it is in BF4.

They should improve the game rather than distract us with prize pools. Change the commander system, reduce insta wipes, and optimize. Content bloating is a bigger issue in COH2 than it is in BF4.

I agree... the biggest complaint I hear about people who loved CoH but cant get into CoH2 is the pay to win aspect...

Great news then, I'm glad they upped the prize pot.

I personally have no animosity towards the casters working on the ESL Go4 project. I just hope they get compensated appropriately for their hard work.

Like I said in the article I'd love for the commentary team to get to live cast the games from the studio.

Nicely said !!!

Greetings All!

Definitely an interesting read, although it appears that the conclusions were derived from a lack of information so me being the giver that I am felt obligated to fill in some of the gaps.

Now I can only speak of what I've seen in the time that I've been with Relic so I will keep this limited to that but otherwise, let's talk ESL.

"announced understatedly/low-key announcement"
So not exactly sure what you meant by this so maybe you could explain or provide exampled of what you expected the announcement to be like? In any case, our announcement included a email blast to all users who have signed up for a Relic account, a press release from ESL, multiple social/blog posts and in-game banners encouraging sign-ups over the course of 3 - 4 weeks.

The $18,000 Commitment
So this is something I've seen coming up quite a bit since the tournament was announced and I apologize for not addressing it sooner. Now, there is a difference between a $18,000 prize pool and a $18,000 commitment and there is a possibility that potentially someone at Relic misspoke at one point regarding these terms but for that I am uncertain. Regardless, what we had is a $18,000 commitment. This means we are committing $18,000 towards running an ESL CoH2 tournament. So, believe it not, ESL does charge for their services and a significant chunk of this commitment went to pay to use their tournament running tools. What was left thus went into the prize pool.

As many have noticed, as of today we were able to significantly increase that prize pool due to some renegotiation of our original contract with ESL in which Relic took on a portion of the workload to free up some of the budget to go back to the players.

Rules
I just wanted to clarify that vet coh2 players and tournament organizers were indeed asked for feedback regarding the original rules and as you know the rules were amended after the first Go4Cup after soliciting additional feedback from the community until the majority of participants felt the rules were in a good place.

Official Caster "Prize"
For the Call for Casters competition, I do have to agree that "prize" was probably the wrong choice of words. Something along the lines of "grant exclusive rights" or something like that should have probably been used. In terms of valuing this, well Stormless, GG and A_E can speak more on it than I can but based off the spikes in views and followers they've received from becoming the "official ESL casters" it definitely has come with its rewards. Of course as A_E mentioned we did send them a Relic swag bag, coordinated with ESL to send them some swag as well. Not to mention we have a couple other exciting things in the works for them which all-in-all will hopefully make this endeavor worth it for them.

"experienced community members have been left on the side lines"
This I would have to strongly disagree with. Numerous "experienced community members" have been consulted both before and during this ESL tournament series for their feedback and opinions. Not to mention, we hoped to work strongly/closely with the founders of CoH2.org in running the ESL tournament. Although key members were notified approximately a couple months prior to announce of ESL and were asked to work directly with Relic to make this tournament as great as possible, offering exclusive casting rights and other benefits as well, we unfortunately never received a response to this offer.

Deflect the blame to ESL
So to be honest, I am not sure how this would even be possible. Let's be straight, ESL has been great and have given us access to some amazing tools. But when it comes down to it, Relic is the tournament organizer, ESL is just the host/tools for this tournament. If anyone were to be blamed for not running the tournament well it would be Relic and we would take ownership of that. That being said, I think the tournament has been a great success so far, with great match-ups, amazing casting and a decent level of participation considering the commitment level involved in playing a cup form start to finish. We also have high hopes that with the increased incentive that these things will continue to improve between now and the end of the competition.

Lastly, I just want to finish with Go4 Cups and Pro League cups are by no measure comparable as one is an entry level tournament format and the other, well as it suggests a pro level tournament with a budget of 10x or more to that of a Go4.

Thanks for raising these topics so clarification could be provided and thank you to everyone in the thread for your feedback!

Amen

"experienced community members have been left on the side lines"
This I would have to strongly disagree with.

I disagree, I was left to run the ESL section since July 2013 on my own with no support. Conveniently a few months before this was announced I was forced to resign from all of my admin duties on ESL by their business director even though I had stopped working on CoH2 because of constant Jam tomorrow promises for nearly two years.

The draft Go4 rules I initially drafted back in 2014 were not implemented, nor was there ANY consultation. (As you can see I last amended them back in 2014)

To be honest there wasn't any discussion, it was more a case of lets wait for IpKai to tire himself out so he gets fed up, goes away and stops bothering us (Relic Entertainment). The same tactic that was implemented with TFN with their launch tournament, the same that happened to the alpha testers that produced a massive bug data base with attribute editor fixes only to be sidelined.

Well I can't speak to why the ESL business director forced you to resign from your position at ESL but I am fairly certain that Relic had nothing to do with this and perhaps you should consult with them as to why this happened. Or perhaps if you prefer I can inquire on your behalf with the contacts at ESL that I have?

But otherwise you are correct, you were not consulted by myself or Relic regarding the rules you drafted. However, other members in the community were consulted in the creation of a different rule set.

Please do, post your findings publicly and I'll also post the skype logs of the chat I had.

I find that quite preposterous as I don't believe anyone that has played or organised a tournament would have come up with that original rule set.

I personally don't agree with the whole Competitive ESL set up that's happening, a little cash thrown in the air, some top players still spending time on it, but I feel like,

1. This is long overdue, and delayed mostly because of Relic's inability to properly establish a competitive through unbalanced maps and constantly adding in new content without first fixing what already existed.

2. They REALLY need to fix what they already have, and increase the viability of most of the commanders.

3. They need to be more informative on patches, such as what's going to be changed, when, and how people can contribute to make sure it balances an issue without bringing up another.

I do feel like Relic has slightly blind sighted on ESL, and promoting that over fixing the game and establishing ties with the community.

+398

Except I think the competitive aspect finally growing can never be a bad thing!

Great! Please link me your ESL profile and I will follow up for you.

747737, that's all you'll need

I pretty much was forced to resign because I vented out in public my frustrations with me just being constantly shut down.

I'm going to post an extract of one of my PMs to your predecessor, out of respect I won't post any replies from her and omitted any sensitive information.

I only want to do cool things for the game, I do it in my free time because I love the game and the player base but it was a really bad time for me. I wasn't having a great time at work and I was trying to apply for hospital pharmacy clinician jobs up and down the country with no success sometimes going to interviews and not getting anywhere.

It was nice to just have that bit of positivity from the game at the time because I have suffered from depression in the past mostly due to my mother dying when I was 18 before I left for University.

However after WFA my small piece of positivity just turned horrible. Players knew I was in the alpha and with every buggy update and balance change I would get a barrage of abuse. People calling me a paid shill and a various amount of unmentionables. It really put a dent in my attitude towards the playerbase

As a group we were upset about what was going and we made that forum post which got locked and there's been no official reply but we took that the outburst from X that day was the unofficial reply which was basically tough shit, stop complaining or get lost.

Despite that my depression had come back after all these events and it's been really hard for me to function over the last few months, I managed to find a job and I found a different game as an outlet but it still saddens me that there was this massive breakdown over something so small.

Sorry to lay on all this heavy stuff but I just wish you would have heard me out instead of just making me out to be a serial dev abuser and a toxic community member. I'm not a horrible person, I do a lot of voluntary work as well as my day job helping people and it just upsets me that I've been made out to be such a monster.

I just want to say the whole series of events had a negative impact on me, being fobbed off constantly and being left to hang out to dry makes a person unwilling to trust people again. So I hope you can see where I am coming from.

I acknowledge that people were say that's pretty sad to be upset over a video game but I was in a dark place at the time.

I see plenty of campaigns from Relic staff about standing up to harassment and bullying but they don't realize how easily some members of staff have just completely trampled over people's dreams and aspirations in the past.

If there's an internal discussion about how Relic talks and deals with people in the scene that's great, it's all I could hope for so that no one has to go through the same shit I had to.

I've been a part of this community for almost 2 years now and i couldn't help but notice a certain dynamic in place:
On 1 side we have Relic,a lazy developer who has lots of great ideas and the means to implemet them but not the will and on the other side a fanatically dedicated fanbase and community who are willing to do a lot just cuz they love this game .
The community's dedication is what made this game where it is now and this is something not to be taken for granted, just head over to paradox forums and witness how much the devs are willing to interact with their community .
The official coh2 forums were a mess, and offered little help and staff members used to copy paste generic answers ( true story).
I dont know who ipkaifung is but i can tell from ppl's comments that he's a highly respectable member of the community , but the sad truth is that he will never be recognized for his work simply cuz he , and others like him happened at a too early stage of the game's cycle .
Let me put it this way, if it weren't for his and other ppl's work, guys like A_E and Stormless would have never had the chance to cast the ESL cups ( even though for free) , and Stormless and A_E 's current ventures will allow others to maybe make money out of casting this game in the futurre.
To be fair though , this ESL buisness is really nice , the game is getting more and more popular and we have Relic to thank for that .

PS:Before defending relic being not lazy , think of the searching sound bug that's still kickin' since launch .